Sunday, November 27, 2011

The Joy of Reprints

Reprints are wonderful for authors. You don't do any additional work, your story gets the chance to find more readers, and you get paid again. Two of my stories have recently been reprinted in big fat anthologies (the best kind). "Eliot Wrote" is included in LIGHTSPEED: YEAR ONE, along with stories by Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, George R.R. Martin, and Bruce Sterling, among others. The anthology, perhaps self-evidently, features stories from the first year of the SF website Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams.


The other reprint is ALIEN CONTACT, edited by Marty Halpern, which are stories of... well, alien contact. Authors include Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Swanwick, Jack Skillingstead, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King. Mine is "Laws of Survival," one of my favorites among my own work.


Finally, loosely in the "reprint" category -- very, very loosely -- is a hilarious play I saw last night: THE COMPLEAT WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The three-person cast did indeed cover all the works, presenting the history plays as a football game tossing around the throne of England, the sixteen comedies in a hilarious mish-mash, OTHELLO as an "African-Italian homeboy rap," and HAMLET as an audience-participation scholarly analysis of Ophelia by a Freudian drama critic. If you ever get a chance to see this play, do so. I bet even the Bard would have loved it.

5 comments:

Dr. Phil (Physics) said...

Hope College's Summer Repertory Theatre has done The Complete Wks of Wm Shakespeare (Abridged) twice and both productions were delightful. "All the comedies are the same." (snicker)

Dr. Phil

Dave Creek said...

My family and I saw it outdoors at the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival in Louisville's Central Park back in June. It's a hoot!

Phil Friel said...

I love reprints, and really must look out for these anthologies. Nancy, are these also available in ebook format? I'm reading more and more on my Kindle these days. And what about your novels? I came upon a paperback of Beggars and Choosers earlier this evening when I was digging in the vaults for something else, and I thought to myself "I wonder if Nancy Kress has her Beggars series out in ebook format. An omnibus would be very nice." ;)

Dave, are you the same Dave Creek who has had a few stories published in Analog? If so, I really enjoyed them, and actually reviewed several of them a few years back when doing my reviews of the SF magazines for Tangent Online. What have you been doing recently, and have you ever had your stories published in collected book form? And get one of your three blogs up and running! It would be nice to keep up-to-date with what you're writing these days. :)

Nancy Kress said...

Phil-- I have a bunch of my books up as ebooks for Kindle and Nook, but not yet the entire Beggars series. I'm working on this slowly. I'm not sure if either anthology is available in e-format,but it would be simple to check on Amazon.

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